This invention relates to adaptation of an audio response based on noise or other interfering ambient signals.
When one listens to music, voice, or other audio over headphones, one is often seeking a private experience. Using the headphones presents the audio in a fashion that does not disturb others in one's vicinity and hopefully prevents sounds in one's environment (i.e., ambient noise such as conversation, background noise from airplanes or trains, etc.) from interfering with one's enjoyment of the audio. Listening to the appropriate audio can also prevent such environmental sounds from intruding into or distracting from one's train of thought, creating a sense of privacy or focus on task. However, if the audio one wishes to listen to is too loud or too dynamic, it can in and of itself become a distraction. One can manually try to find the right audio level to just hide or mask environmental sound while still being quiet enough to just stay in the background of one's attention, but if the ambient environment is dynamic—as is likely—the need to re-adjust becomes a distraction.
In situations in which one wishes to use the music as a background to cognitive activities, the user may adjust the volume so that the input music or other signal masks distractions present in the ambient noise while not intruding too much onto one's attention.
Approaches to adapting a speech signal for presentation in the presence of noise have made use of compression with the goal of achieving good intelligibility for the speech. Such compression can also reduce the propensity for dynamics in the audio to attract one's attention away from a cognitive task.